To Hold the Bridge

By: Garth Nix

Narrated by: Nicola Barber, Raphael Corkhill, Roger Wayne, Christian Coulson, Steven Crossley, Michael Crouch, John Lee, Polly Lee

Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

An entertaining short-story collection from best-selling fantasy author Garth Nix, including an Old Kingdom novella, a short story set in the same world as Shade's Children, and another story set in the world of A Confusion of Princes.

Garth Nix is renowned for his legendary fantasy works, but To Hold the Bridge showcases his versatility ,as the collection offers 19 short stories from every genre of literature, including science fiction, paranormal, realistic fiction, mystery, and adventure. Whether writing about vampires, detectives, ancient spirits, or odd jobs, Garth Nix's ability to pull his readers into new worlds is extraordinary.

The complete list of narrators includes: Christian Coulson, Steven Crossley, Michael Crouch, John Lee, Polly Lee, Davina Porter, Raj Varhma, Nicola Barber, Raphael Corkhill, and Roger Wayne.

©2015 Garth Nix (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers

Not part of the old kingdom series

A couple really good mind twisting stories but a lot others I didn't really care for. I bought this because it was listed as part of the old kingdom series but it was not.

Love The Old Kingdom, Returned this Addition

All of the other books in the Old Kingdom make up some of my favorite books that I have both read and listened to many times. I was excited to see this one released, but I was sorely disappointed.

The stories were now only short, as is advertised, but they were also very weak. I Love a good short story, but I found these uninteresting.

There are many narrators, and most of them were sub-par. I can't think of any that I liked in particular. I'd probably give most of them a second chance.

The Old Kingdom novels provide rich stories, character development, and although they are about a belief system that not too many people believe to be true, manage to present these concepts very well. They also manage to present a system of death and the afterlife without purposely insulting people who have other beliefs about the afterlife. This book, on the other hand, takes several different swings at Christianity that I found to be downright offensive. One of the chapters was particularly bad, so I skipped it, but I was surprised to find that the book continued to attempt to paint Christians as walking jokes.

I will probably listen to Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, Clariel, and Goldenhand many more times, but this particular addition will be put in the junk pile.

Meh

I just didn't really care for this book. I gave it 4 stars because of the great narrators. I just chugged through all of the different stories because I thought I'd find a couple of really enjoyable ones. The first one was great. I guess I may just be spoiled by the Abhorsen trilogy seeing as how those are my all-time favorite audible books/narrations.

Decent

I was a disappointed that their was only one short story for the Abhorsen series in this, though I did enjoy the Hellboy and Sherlock Homes short story's the most out of the other short story's. I'll make this clear I have never read anything but the Abhorsen series from this author, so I did not really get much backstory for the other story's and I really did not need them.
Overall I would say it's a good book to listen to.

Not as good as Across the Wall

I wouldn't say that this was a bad collection, but I would say that the short stories were either really exciting or really dull. It was kind of a mixed bag. For whatever reason, I found that all of the stories with female main characters were top-notch and some could use their own book series. Nix clearly has a penchant for strong female leads. His male led stories were more variable. Not to say that I disliked any of the male characters, but I did feel like quite a few (with the notable exception of the Shade's Children series story) were not as well developed as I would have liked. Due to this lack of development and quite a lot of extraneous world-building (overwhelming for short stories), I was often unable to connect with these characters which is vital for me to enjoy the story. Another thing that I missed was that in Across the Wall, Nix included intros to each story which detailed how he had come to write that story. I know this is unusual in short story collections, but knowing the anthology theme or reason he wrote a short story created more of an attachment to that story for me.

great mix of greatness

in typical Garth Nix fashion this book is filled with wonderment and talented storytelling. highly recommend to anyone.

Meh.

Struggled to finish--in fact, never did. Performances were good, hard to hear at times. :(

Mish mosh bleh

Disappointing, partly to blame on Audible which put this eclectic collection of short stories up as "the next in the series" after Goldenhand. The first story was set in the same world, but my confusion skyrocketed with story two. Some of the stories were OK, but there is not enough continuity of genre. If it had been a paper version, I would not have finished it.

it was decent.

it was decent. a nice mix of science f.and fantasy. always enjoy his stuff xxxxxxxxx

Misleading false advertising. Glad I could return

It leads you on with this cute little depiction of the one of the guard posts of the wall and it's charter symbols. Any fan would read the synopsis and look at the cover and think this is an anthology of short stories about the old kingdom. But only the first story is part of the Abhorsen series. It is a short boring story that does not further the plot or give you any insight into any of the characters you actually care about. It's literally just about a random guard. The rest of the stories are completely random stories about completely random things. They're not even well written, in most of them I couldn't even tell what was going on. One of them is literally a fanfiction. I have nothing against fan fictions but I can read better written ones online for free.